


A quiet, green place

by Temaris



Category: Mad Max: Fury Road, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Possibly Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 23:56:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7075945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Temaris/pseuds/Temaris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was doing something else entirely, some other terrible thing,  and then somehow i’m writing teen wolf in the apocalyptic world of mad max</p><p>Huh. </p><p>Stiles has a place. Derek finds one.</p><p>(not going to write more, most likely, it's just tumblr dust) (There are deaths alluded to, but not all are lost in this) (Except the chicken. The chicken is toast)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A quiet, green place

Stiles doing this rube goldberg thing to survive in the wilderness, and his father is kinda a mad max, alive but not mad, probably not mad, and he travels and tries to help people, and Stiles just hopes he’ll keep coming home. 

But Stiles knows how to tap the aquifer and get water from things, and make shit grow and people think it’s magic, and maybe-maybe not but he has BOOKS because when everyone else was looting tvs and cash his Mom cleaned out the DIY and farming sections of a bookstore because she had this figured out. So Stiles has a ton of books on brew your own jam dealio kinda thing, and so he just needs the seeds and animals, and he stays where he is, mostly, but goes and gets seeds. If he hears of green places he travels, sometimes for months, leaves his rube goldberg set up to look after itself and _it does_ and sometimes he comes home and home is small and hidden and the green is fading and he makes it alive again because that’s who he is, and he is kidnapped and used and assaulted, and tattooed against his will, and he escapes from the warboys and can’t save them because they don’t know they need it. He doesn’t save the Wives, doesn’t meet the Wives, because saving the wives isn’t his story, he barely even knows they exist, and there’s no way to get them, but he knows of them, and their sister-wives, and he wants to save the Banshee and Archer and Coyote but they might as well be moon mist.

He visits the Citadel to trade, cautiously, a year later after rumours reach him, and he meets the new matriarchs, and hears the story, how one day the Imperator Braeden took off on a routine trip to Gaz town but really was helping the Wives escape. Immortan Pete was ENRAGED and followed with all his warboys, and one of those warboys was hooked up to a blood bag that was once a wolf, and is now nothing, no name, just a number and the veins that make the right kind of blood, but once he was called Derek, and he wanted to leave he did leave, and took Jax with him because they were tied together by the medics, and they fell in with Braeden, and Jax falls in love with Banshee, and she falls in love with him too, and Braeden takes them to the green place but it’s gone, salted out and barren.

And they chose to come back to the citadel, and Braeden and the wives take the citadel, destroy Immortan Pete, raise up the slaves and warboys.

This is the story Stiles hears, and when he asks what happened to Derek, the wandering wolf, Braeden shrugs, and Archer frowns, and Banshee smiles at the baby cradled in her arms who looks like Jax, a little.

“He walked into the desert,” is all the matriarch says, and whether she knows more and will not say, or knows nothing and cannot, Stiles does not know. But he does his trading and smiles at the growing green, and agrees to work with Banshee on the irrigation system to capture more condensate because the sun boils it away. It takes a while, and it’s nearly three months before he heads home.

Derek walked into the desert. 

He loves them, there’s a fracture in his empty heart that has let them in, but he knows he cannot stay, and he walks.

Long after, far out in the desert, he finds a little rube goldberg kinda place. No one is there, but it’s clear someone loved it until very recently. He doesn’t know who they were or where they went (but he’s always got one ear open for their return), and he doesn’t really think about it, he just works out how to irrigate and water, picks things, reads books in wonder, preserves and salts, pickles and cans, and stores up vibrant food against the bad times until the day when the sound of a booted foot on the sand makes him freeze and he whirls, teeth bared, a spoon dripping strawberry jam from one hand, and snarls. The intruder snarls back, and the fight seems inevitable, except he asks, “Wait, dude, *jam*? That’s amazing! Where the hell did you get the sugar?”

And Derek shrugs, he’d found some sacks of it in an ancient little store far out in the badlands, and had hauled it for trade, but this was better, and this seems to communicate to the person at the gate, whose eyes crinkle up behind the tightly wrapped scarf that is covering his face like they’re smiling, and stalks in.

“Awesome, dude,” he says and he’s unwrapping the sandy grey scarf from around his head, and the smile is even better than those pretty gold-brown eyes had promised. There’s a scraggily beard and a series of moles that explain the scarf, and razor short hair that might be brown or might just be filthy.

“I’ve got some shit to do, but I’ll be back in a couple of hours, don’t burn the place down,” he adds, and turns on his heel. Derek sees the huge back pack slung over his shoulder and frowns, but the jam smells like it might be about to catch, and he has to deal with that first, but he wonders wonders wonders what the guy had in it.

Some hours later, the jam’s all sealed up in old clean jars, and he settles in the chair to eat a couple of the remaining strawbs and listen to the satisfying pop pop pop as the lids snap shut.

“Hey.” The guy meanders back in this time from the middle of the warren of buildings and caves that makes up the homestead. “’M Stiles,” he says, and drops into a chair. "You?“ He seems too busy shoving off his jacket and toeing off his boots to pay much attention to Derek, but his quick glances at him are sharper and take in more than Derek is comfortable with.

Derek shrugs again. He’s not entirely sure what his name is any more, and he is pretty confused by the entire business of not being shot and thrown out of the homestead.

"No name. Like Clint,” Stiles nods knowingly. Derek wonders what he knows. "Cool. I’m gonna need to call you something though, so we’re going with Dude, until we get a better idea.“ Derek is appalled and Stiles winks at him. "Gonna need something better, fast, huh? Gonna rip my throat out with your teeth, huh?”

Derek thinks that he might like this feeling, of being teased and welcomed and not made to do or be anything more than present.

“You did a good job on keeping everything alive,” Stiles says, a few days later. He’s rummaging through the pantry. Derek waits for more, but Stiles doesn’t have anything else. Derek is still waiting for the ‘but’ – but you shouldn’t have broken in, but you shouldn’t have stolen my food, but you shouldn’t have used up all the fruit and jars. It doesn’t come.

“One of the chickens stopped laying months ago.” He glances over, and grins quickly, brightly. It’s a little wicked and makes Derek feel like he’s been staring into the sun (again), suddenly conscious of feeling grubby and grimy, sand in his teeth and his hair, sweat crusted on his body and he feels strange and small and too big for his skin all at once.

He misses most of what Stiles says next, too busy staring, but tunes back in at “Chicken stew?”

A smile pulls at the sides of his face, his mouth already watering at the idea – the sense memory that floods in cannot possibly be matched to reality, but he doesn’t care. Stiles nods decisively. “Gertrude’s last moments are upon her.” He shoves a pan of water onto the stove, and darts out.

From outside comes a furore of wings and feathers and clucking and yelps of pain – Gertrude isn’t going down without a fight it seems, and Derek smiles wider, ducking his head to hide it (from no one), and absently touches his face, tracing out the unfamiliar lines of happiness that it shapes on his skin. 

Stiles reappears some minutes later, scratched but holding a dead chicken hanging limply by its neck. He pulls the boiling water off the heat and dunks the unfortunate bird, chatting all along, narrating everything as though he can’t help it. 

“I got used to telling people how to do shit,” he says casually as he plucks feathers, a quick hard flick of his wrist and wet handfuls clump onto the floor one after the other. "Can you shove them in one of my baskets? With a lid would be better.“

Derek knows where the grass baskets are, had sat and stared at one for hours not long after he found the homestead, trying to work out how it had been made, a braided fibre and twisted, and woven in winding loops. 

He glances at Stiles who sighs, "No one ever believes I make ‘em, and you know, fair, I’m not very good at it, but it’s easy and I’ve been braiding straw since I was like yey big–” He drops a hand to knee height and Derek has a momentary image of a small inquisitive toddler all beams and curiosity and tumbling half learned words peering back up him in frank interest.

“Pretty bad, huh?” He comes back to Stiles saying gently, and Derek startles at his own hands clenched hard on the rim of a woven basket he doesn’t remember fetching. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t even know if there is anything that he can say. Words aren’t his thing any more. Like Job, he has lost it all, and there is no god, no adversary, because humans did this, killed the seas and the land, turned the sky against us and destroyed the last dregs of civilisation. Ended him.

All gone. Apart from the citadel, maybe.

He’s thinking of the Citadel even though it had almost gone from his memory. Maybe it’s coming back because Stiles is talking about it, about trading with them, and how the prices got fairer after everything changed, and how beautiful the matriarchs are, and Derek smiles at the ground. They were beautiful. Imperator Braeden with her scars and missing eye, Banshee with her lost voice, Archer whose swollen belly had not stopped her for one single moment, and the others, his sisters, his goddesses, his lost girls. Who were never his at all, not any body’s but their own. But he’d helped, a little, on their fury road.

“Are you Derek?”

His head snaps up and he stares for a panicked moment at Stiles. Stiles’ hands are spread and flattened, palm down and empty, “Hey, hey, easy, Lydia told me about this guy, travelled with them a ways, worked with Braeden. Said he was good people, to look out for him.” He pauses, watching Derek. Derek slumps back into his chair, his pounding heart beat slowing. “It’s nothing bad. I won’t –” he hesitates, “I won’t say that name again unless you tell me it’s okay.”

“Can’t,” he says, and his voice is hoarse and broken, but still there. He’s surprised.

“Can’t tell me? Or can’t tell me it’s okay?” he asks and Derek nods. The kid is smart.

“I can still call you Dude if you’d rather– okay, okay, not dude. Mate, fella, Dawg, runner–”

“Derek,” he says, and feels exhausted. Stiles looks pleased, and he closes his eyes. Today he can just be.

“Did you ever find the hot spring,” Stiles says, a few days later. The question is the kind of mildly pointed thing his sister would have said, before. He shakes his head.

Which is how he ends up in a bath that reeks of sulphur but is the best, most blissful thing he’s experienced in years. He floats, drifts, loses time and place and everything until he opens his eyes, staring at the dimly illuminated cave ceiling, his whole body broiled and limp and clean.

“The sulphur is a problem,” Stiles agrees, drifting somewhere nearby. “But I’m pretty sure neither of us cares.”

He’s right.


End file.
